In a recent interview with EonMusic, Steve Vai opened up about how him and Ozzy Osbourne got carried away writing songs together back in 1995, and wrote an entire unreleased album together.
Vai stated, “I’m sitting on a whole Ozzy record, It’s a project that I recorded that’s sitting on the shelf. I don’t have any control over it or the rights to it, obviously, but we did record some pretty good stuff.”
When Osbourne was in the midst of recording Ozzmosis, his label and manager decided he should write with other people. Vai explained, “Ozzy and I got carried away because we were having a lot of fun, and we ended up recording a lot of stuff. And then we started scheming: ‘Hey, let’s make a new record!'” Vai added they continued forward with the project, “until the hammer came down, and [management] basically said ‘What are you doing? No, you’ve just got to take a song from Vai and finish your record.'”
Only one track they wrote made it onto Ozzmosis, however, two other tracks made their way on Vai records. “Danger Zone” was on his 1991 collaborative album Vai / Gash with singer Johnny “Gash” Sombretto and “Dyin’ Day” found its way to 1996’s Fire Garden.
Vai concluded in saying that, “There was some real, real heavy stuff because I used an octave divider on everything, I thought, ‘Okay you’re going to work with Ozzy, and all these incredible guitar players have played with Ozzy. What are you going to do?’ I was not going to be conventional. … That’s not me, as you know, but I had to be accessible.”
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